In a first for Denver, police have returned marijuana to a smoker - with an apology. The man had a permit for medical use of marijuana. Moral of the story: If you have a permit, keep it with you all the time.

Law review articles about the Supreme Court's Blakely and Booker decisions are sprouting like wildfire. Law Prof Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy has a roundup.

But, there's also good advice out there for practitioners and clients. Federal post-conviction expert Alan Ellis has just published this guide (pdf), which we agreed to host on TalkLeft.

NACDL has a new article today, Booker Advisory: Into The Breyer Patch, available free to all.

There are also seminars around the country. TChris, our contributing blogger, who was counsel for Booker and who argued the case in the Supreme Court, is on the road a lot these days, speaking at CLE seminars and providing tactical advice. The AFDA is held this seminar in Los Angeles last week. Check out the agenda portion at the bottom for a good description of what's at stake.

by TChris

New York's criminal defense lawyers are mad as heck, and they're not going to take it any more. Fed up with "a pattern of prejudicial public statements by Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro," the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed a disciplinary complaint against the prosecutor.

The complaint, by the group's Prosecutorial and Judicial Complaint Center, focused on a Pirro news conference in January announcing the indictment of Eddie Cordero Sr. ... The lawyers' group said Pirro implied that Cordero was HIV positive, a disclosure that might violate state law. She went on to describe the crime as a classic case why violent sex offenders should be subjected to civil detention once their prison terms are over.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom may be a good liberal on civil liberties issues, but he needs a few lessons when it comes to fighting crime. Yesterday he proposed that the city's firefighters act as crime fighters. If he had his way, there would be a fire engine on every corner, waiting to bust an offender in the act.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suggested Monday that the city park fire trucks and their crews on streets in violence-prone neighborhoods to deter crime....His idea is to pull the firefighters out of their firehouses, where they're stationed when not responding to fires and medical emergencies, and plant them in their rigs nearby -- visible to the public. There are 43 fire stations in San Francisco.

His suggestion was prompted by the high number of homicides in the city. His thought process is, "A thug...would be less likely to shoot someone in front of a firefighter."

University of Colorado President Elizabeth (Betsy) Hoffman has resigned. The principal reason was the football recruiting scandal. Was Ward Churchill a contributing factor? I agree with Instapundit, who says:

A lot of readers think that the Ward Churchill angle has been downplayed, but I really don't think it had much to do with her resignation -- the football scandal is bigger, has been fermenting longer, and much more directly implicated the University Administration. Churchill certainly didn't help, and it's possible that he was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I really think that the football scandal was the main mover here.

Colorado Pols offers another reason: The Regents were tired of Hoffman's demand for more money.

Jackson Trial Update
Monday, March 7

While MSM is reporting the salacious details of the accuser's brother's testimony today in the Michael Jackson trial, Smoking Gun has the documents showing the brother has given three very different and conflicting versions.

The accuser's brother was first interviewed in May, 2003 by LA psychologist Stanley Katz. Katz had been recommended by the mother's lawyer, Larry Feldman. Coincidentally, Feldman and Katz were the lawyer-psychologist duo that spearheaded the lawsuit for the 1993 accuser.

In subsequent interviews, the accuser's brother "tweaked" the details of his story. Not only did the allegations against Jackson become more graphic and serious, the details as to time, place, clothing, etc. vary substantially.

Jackson's lawyer, Tom Mesnereau, should have a field day tomorrow.

Now that the Supreme Court has determined that the juvenile death penalty violates evolving global standards of human decency and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, isn't it time for the Court to take it another step forward and abolish the death penalty for everyone?

Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute makes the case here.

Good news for civil liberties: Matrix, the multi-state police database effort, is on its last leg. It began with 13 participating states, and is now down to three. Today, Michigan announced it would leave the program.

...only Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut remain. State police also said they were concerned about future funding and unrealistic expectations to expand the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange.

The program's potential for abuse contributed to states' decisions to abandon it.

©ivil libertarians and those opposed to big government fear the breadth of data stored in the MATRIX will allow law enforcement to spy on law abiding citizens. Its data mining capabilities, for example, would allow police to create lists of people who fit criminal profiles based on their ethnicity, address or credit history.

A Judge today denied a request to dismiss any charges against Army Reservist Sabrina Harman. She faces a maxiumum of six and one half years in jail if convicted on all counts in her Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse trial.

The 27-year-old reservist and former pizza shop manager from Lorton, Va., is accused of writing "rapeist" on the leg of one prisoner and forcing another to stand on a box with wires in his hands and telling him he would be electrocuted if he fell. Harman is also accused of taking photographs of a group of naked detainees.

Her lawyers tried to get some charges dismissed on the ground that the prisoners weren't really injured because they had sandbags on their head and didn't know they were being photographed.

Trial is set for May 12. Given the judge's ruling, it could be a good time for Reservist Harman to make a deal. Background on her case is here.

by TChris

With the exception of executing the innocent, it doesn't get any worse than this.

Arrested, tried and convicted in just three months, [Michael] Williams was sentenced to hard labor for life with no possibility for parole and dispatched to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, one of the nation's most notorious and deadly prisons. At times the institution lived up to its reputation. In one incident, Williams said, he was stabbed 16 times.

It took Williams' jury only an hour to decide that he beat and sexually assaulted his math tutor. That was in 1981, and Williams was just 16. Williams was the victim of his tutor's mistaken identification.

Now, nearly 24 years after his arrest, independent DNA tests by three laboratories, including the Louisiana state crime lab, show what Williams has long contended: He is not the man who committed the crime.

Williams becomes the 159th convicted defendant whose innocence has been established by DNA. Williams' lawyers and the district attorney in Jonesboro are (in the DA's words) "in the process of reaching a mutually agreeable method for securing his release from incarceration . . . on March 11."

by TChris

Milwaukee Police Officer Jon Bartlett has been charged with "terrorizing Frank Jude Jr. with a knife and kicking him so hard in the head that bones crackled." But this isn't the first time that Bartlett has been accused of using needless violence against a black suspect. Bartlett "had been accused of using excessive force three times against other black men - one of them fatally - in his five years with Milwaukee police, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Sunday."

How Bartlett got hired for the job is a mystery.

Before Bartlett was hired by Milwaukee police in 1999, he was convicted of trying to escape from police and got less-than-positive reviews from two employers, including a demotion from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Police Department.

Also charged with beating Jude is Officer Daniel Masarik ... and yes, you know where this is going. Masarik also has a checkered record, having "used a stun gun on six suspects in 11 weeks last year, the newspaper reported."

by TChris

As the number of high speed police chases ending in death continues to grow, a bipartisan group of California legislators is proposing legislation that would eliminate immunity from damages for police officers who engage in a reckless pursuit. California law enforcement groups prefer to increase the penalties that can be imposed upon fleeing drivers, a proposal that, by itself, isn't likely to solve the problem.

"I want something that is actually going to save lives," said state Sen. Sam Aanestad, who sponsored a failed bill last year that would have limited police immunity in accidents from high-speed chases. "Probably the worst way to catch someone is by chasing them."

Since 1987, police have had what a state appeals court in 2002 termed a "get-out-of-liability-free" law even if police violate their own department's pursuit policy.

Aanestad is naming his bill after 15-year-old Kristie Priano of Chico, who was killed in 2002 when her family's minivan was struck by an unlicensed 15-year-old who was fleeing police after taking her mother's car without permission. The victim's mother, Candy Priano argues that there was no need for a pursuit because police knew where the driver lived.

California police chased more than 7,000 drivers in 2003. The chases resulted in 58 deaths, including 18 innocent individuals who weren't involved in the pursuit.